Are we all upside down?

This is one of those rants occasionally I feel a real need to express. Forgive me, normal service will be resumed after this ‘break’.

Coffee in hand, soapbox set up, let me begin.

Today, we are all struggling to transform ourselves in our businesses, even just within ourselves, to adjust to the current economic difficulties we all seem presently to be facing.

We are not only confronted with the toughest downturn in modern times but with all the pressures with the speed of decision-making, and technological advances that seem to just simply ‘suck up’ more of our daily lives instead of helping to resolve it.

We have the pressures of global competitiveness and calls that constantly are urging us to never stand still because others aren’t.

We often become overwhelmed by the merging, acquiring, and rethinking that is going on constantly around us, the changes in processes, new alliances and the sudden emergence of a ‘new kid on the block’ who sees a weakness and rapidly fills that gap overnight.

Oh yes, and we still are not very good at being more innovative!

Lots more hotfixes or a more radical redesign?
These pressures compel us to focus on a host of ‘quick fixes’ but what we are failing to recognize is where all these changes fit within our long term plans.

Just finding the opportunity to take out precious ‘thinking’ time to synthesise and reorganize ourselves seems impossible, we are just getting caught up in the flotsam of life, just bobbing along.

The Innovating Era: Creative Destruction or Destructive Creation?

Creative Destruction
We have been entering some perilous times recently and I can’t imagine when Joseph Schumpeter outlined his groundbreaking efforts for explaining “creative destruction” he or anyone else, could imagine this being flipped around to what we are facing more today, in a more innovative era, that of “destructive creation”.

Schumpeter saw “creative destruction” as the renewing, through new innovation, society’s dynamics that would lead to higher levels of economic development and welfare.

At the same time recognizing that this destroyed a few of the incumbents to the benefit of many more newcomers and increasing value creation for broader society.

Today it seems we are caught in the reverse of this- the process of “destructive creation”- where it benefits a few rather than the many. This sets out often to destroy or greatly diminish the usage value of existing products and services before it is optimal to actually do so, and in the process incurring often significant costs not taken into account at the time.

These unforeseen issues have consequences that negatively affect parts of society not foreseen or contemplated at the time.